


Harbingers

by StopTalkingAtMe



Category: Vampyr (Video Game)
Genre: Angst, Blood and Gore, Canon-Typical Violence, Gen, Horror, Pre-Canon, Religious Imagery & Symbolism, Yuletide Treat, references to pregnancy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-23
Updated: 2019-12-23
Packaged: 2021-02-26 01:14:12
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 13,319
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21924997
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/StopTalkingAtMe/pseuds/StopTalkingAtMe
Summary: Old Bridget isn't the only creature to hunt on the streets of London.
Relationships: Sean Hampton & Old Bridget, Sean Hampton & Tom Watts
Comments: 5
Kudos: 16
Collections: Yuletide 2019





	Harbingers

**Author's Note:**

  * For [greygerbil](https://archiveofourown.org/users/greygerbil/gifts).



The first time Sean Hampton ever heard anything more of the Sewer Dog than heavily veiled rumours and dark hints, it came courtesy of a Welsh ex-sailor called Ifor Roberts. Even then it wasn’t the full story: Roberts didn’t speak of the Sewer Dog, but of the _Gwrach-y-Rhibyn_ , the Welsh Witch of the Mists: the withered hag with black teeth and reeking breath, who rode the night air on tattered bat-like wings.

Sean had heard plenty of tales along those lines before, but even drunk Roberts had a knack for telling a story, and it struck Sean that there seemed to be something about _this_ particular story: something about the way the Welshman told it, perhaps, or the atmosphere in the Turtle _as_ he told it, with the rain sleeting against the grimy windows, and the damp humid atmosphere crowding close around them, thick with the smell of smoke and spilled beer and other men’s sweat.

Or maybe it was the look in Tom Watts’s eyes when he collected the glasses from their table at a crucial moment in the story and the finality in his voice when he interjected with, "She’s a long way from fucking Wales, isn’t she?"

Or the way Tom avoided Sean’s gaze when he tried to catch his eyes.

Sean was used to people trying to hide things from him, but not at all used to not knowing the reason _why._

A long way from Wales or not, there were times when it seemed like a witch of mists and rivers was ideally suited for a city like London, particularly in an area dominated by the grey stretch of the tidal river, its muddy banks shining wet with ceaseless rain and wreathed with drifting fog.

The tale had stuck in his mind, and it was the Hag he was thinking of – Ifor’s insistence that he had seen her and Tom Watts’s grim expression – when he heard shouts outside his office in the night shelter. Boots sounded on the stone, but he was already up and on his feet, hurrying towards the door. From outside he could hear shouting, and another sound which made his mouth tighten into a grim line: someone was wailing in pain and terror.

"It’s Billy," someone was telling him. "The Wet Boot Boys have come for him."

Sean swallowed back a curse, and elbowed his way through the crowd into the cold night air. "Back inside, everyone," he ordered, shaking off whoever it was who was grasping at his arm, begging him to leave it be. "I said _back inside._ "

Ahead he could hear the muted thump of boots against flesh, two thugs in the middle of the stamp-and-pound of a rhythmless dance that was all-too-familiar to Sean, while another man watched, smoking a cigarette with a hard slash of a grin. Clay Cox. Sean had seen that grin before, and he knew it meant murder. And in the midst of this was Billy, curled up into a ball, and trying to roll away from the boots that came from all sides, slamming into his chest, his ribs, his balls. He was already a weeping, spitting, bloody mess. Just as one of the thugs raised his boot to stamp down on Billy’s weeping terrified face, Sean charged in.

He slammed into the thug, sending him staggering off balance for a couple of steps. It didn’t last: the thug spun with a fast reflexive little jab that connected with his jaw, badly aimed but still hard enough to send Sean reeling. The thug advanced, then hesitated, recognising him.

"Don’t push it, Irish," Clay said, pointing his hand-rolled cigarette at Sean. "We ain’t got no problem with you. Just a few bones to pick with Billy here."

"Do it somewhere else, then," Sean said, touching his fingers to his face. A splinter of pain shot up from the tender spot and he flinched. Behind him, Billy was weeping with hitching sobs, dragging himself back towards the shelter.

"Fine by me," Clay said with a shrug and the smile of a shark, all teeth and the black eyes of a killer. "But Billy’s coming with us. We got some shit we need to work out. We can do it the hard way, or we can talk it out over a drink like civilised men, what d’you say, Billy-boy?"

"Billy?" Sean took a careful step back making certain to keep his eyes on Clay and his thugs. "Do you want to go with them?"

He got no answer. Not aloud anyway, but Billy’s expression of terror was all the answer Sean needed.

"There you have it, sirs. Billy’s declined your kind offer." It took almost everything he had to keep his voice calm, but it still shook a little. "And now I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask you to leave my shelter. It’s getting late."

"Don’t be fucking stupid," Clay snapped. "This has fuck-all to do with you so stay out of it."

"While Billy’s staying in my shelter, he’s my responsibility." And then, over his shoulder, "Get up, Billy." _Stop grovelling_.

Clay caught the cigarette between his lips and squared up to Sean. "Tell me something, Irish, you willing to die for him?"

From the building someone yelled that the police were on their way. In the uneasy silence that followed, the smile dropped from Clay’s face, leaving his eyes black and glittering. He lowered his voice, so that only Sean could hear, and said, "You’re a fucking dead man, Hampton." Then, grinning again, he reached up and tapped Sean’s cheek lightly, making sure to hit against the place where the thug’s fist had connected. The impact sent a spike of pain shooting up into his skull, so intense he wavered on his feet.

Clay winked, then turned away, nodding to his thugs. "Come on, lads, let’s get the fuck out of here. Give Billy some time to think about what he’s done and what’s coming for him." And then he turned on his heel, and pointed at Sean as he backed away. "You think you done him a favour, yeah? We was just gonna smack him about a bit, show him the error of his ways, but now..." He shrugged. "Well, let’s just say I’m no longer in the mood to be forgiving. So. See you around, Billy. Irish." He doffed his hat to the shelter. "Ta ra, folks."

And then he was gone.

The inhabitants of the shelter, who had been collectively holding their breath, erupted in a flurry of voices, everyone talking at once. Except for Sean, who had a sick feeling of growing dread in his gut, and Billy, who had collapsed again and was starting to retch. "Oh Christ," he was saying, "Oh _Christ._ "

Sean, his face bruised and painful and with the taste of blood in his mouth, was thinking much the same thing.

  
  


* * *.

  
  


It was this that was at the forefront of his mind when he’d confessed his sins to Father Mullaney, the priest at the Church of the Most Precious Blood, gathering up all his petty crimes and spilling them out into the close air of the confessional. Father Mullaney had sounded bored and tired, and afterwards, standing by the edge of the river, huddled in his threadbare woollen coat, Sean felt anything but absolved.

In the couple of years he’d spent in London, he’d seen more of its underbelly than he cared to. The city seemed to him a stew into which all the least appetising meats had been thrown: a Purgatory of wet brick and stone, of grimy factory buildings, sewers and underground tunnels, and Southwark was its heart, filled to the brim with more pain and suffering than any one man could bear to see. It was a hard-edged place at the best of times, full of sin and suffering, the godless mingling with the helpless and the heartless, but it had been a long hard winter, and the coming thaw only seemed to bring a bitter edge to the air.

He thought of Billy’s bloody spittle flecking on the stones, the way he’d been holding himself since the kicking he’d taken, hunched in a way that suggested they’d cracked a couple of ribs. Sean knew it was his own guilt making him think there was a glint of accusation in Billy’s eyes, because he had the uncomfortable feeling the real reason why he’d waded into that fight hadn’t been entirely about protecting Billy, but about his own wounded pride. And his offended fury that they’d dared to come into his asylum after one of his flock. He imagined himself in the confessional box then, admitting the true sin he hadn’t been able to bring himself to say: _I think I got a man killed last night, Father._

Clay Cox had been right. They might have let things slide, let Billy escape with a beating, but now? He’d be found floating in the Thames, and it was as good as if Sean had wielded the weapon himself. The worst of it was if he had the chance again he couldn’t imagine himself doing anything any differently.

Sean reached up, and fingered the beads of his rosary, listening to the sound of the water slapping against the stone. For a moment, it wasn’t Billy he was thinking of, or even Clay Cox, but Ifor Roberts’s hag of mists, displaced from her homeland and brought against her will to London.

Then there came a sound, like a flag snapping in the wind. Startled, Sean looked around, his hand instinctively tightening on the crucifix. The image that had come to mind wasn’t a flag, but the unfurling of a pair of black wings, spreading in a vast dark cloud across the sky.

From out of the mist he heard the whine of a dog. The _skritch_ of claws on stone. A sudden burst of running footsteps, running away. Then closer and somewhere above his head: a noise like misplaced air, and a muffled sob.

"Who’s there?" He spoke without thinking, caught himself too late.

Was it his imagination or was there something splayed across the roof, its eyes glittering through the fog? Something dark and hunched, looking very much like a gargoyle.

A trick of the light, surely.

He was shaky today. Jumping at shadows.

Sean was smiling at his own foolishness and about to turn away for home, when the figure unfolded. Not a trick of the light at all, but something real. It seemed to move like an animal, yet it had a certain eerie grace, skidding down the wet tiles so fast it was impossible to see how it could keep itself from falling. Sean opened his mouth to shout a warning as it slid straight off the edge of the roof.

And vanished.

Sean blinked, and then it reappeared in the midst of a burst of smoke like a conjuror’s trick, crouched on the ground in front of the building. When Sean took a step towards it its head snapped towards him.

It was a monster.

Half its face was a bloody mess, the jaw sheared away to reveal its teeth and part of a splintered jaw-bone. Its eyes were clouded over, cataract white. It seemed to see him, though, since it cowered away like a whipped dog. It stank too: he could smell it from here, a mingled faecal reek of shit and sewage and meat on the turn. And it was injured; through the skeletal arms clutching its belly he could see a bloody, gaping wound.

It was, quite possibly, the most pitiful creature he’d ever seen in his life.

When it fled, he hurried after it.

He was never quite certain afterwards why he chose to go after the creature. Perhaps it had been pride or perhaps sheer bloodymindedness, but all he could think of was Billy weeping, mindless with terror and pain.

It was fast and silent, but it left a trail of black fluid in its wake, so it wasn’t hard to follow, and eventually he saw it ahead of him, limping towards the end of a wooden jetty that jutted out over the river.

Sean slowed. Pitiful though the creature might seem, wounded animals could always be dangerous. He held up his hands in a gesture of peace as he advanced over the slippery wooden planks. Crouched on all fours like an animal, it watched him approach. Perhaps it _was_ an animal, he thought, some fragment of marginalia sprung to life from an illustrated manuscript, a dog-faced creature from God knew where.

Except it was wearing shoes. Rudimentary ones that were really little more than flaps of leather held together with strips of cloth, but they were still shoes, even if he could see its toes with their gnarled, blackened nails poking out.

It brought its hands up and splayed them in a fawning gesture of subservience as it made a grating sound deep in its throat, so distorted and garbled that at first he didn’t recognise it as speech. Then he caught the word ‘mister’, uttered in a tone of creeping servility. Not an animal, then, but not exactly a person either, and as he took another cautious step forwards he realised that the black marks on its skin that he’d taken for dirt were actually evidence of some deep inner rot.

He repressed a shudder of revulsion, and murmured, "Mother of God."

The creature went still.

With the tip of its pointing tongue caught between its sharp yellowed teeth – teeth which Sean had the unnerving suspicion might be capable of crunching through even the thickest bone – it stared at him with a reproachful expression, as if chiding him for taking the Holy Mother’s name in vain. Then it spun, and vanished over the edge of the pier.

"Wait," he called, but he was too late. It had gone. Sean hesitated at the drop, eyeing the smear of blood the creature had left on the planks. Below there was a two-metre drop onto a mud bank, where the rotting carcass of a rowing boat had been pulled up high onto the shore. He hesitated for a moment before he remembered that the creature, whatever it was, was hurt, then he lowered himself down and dropped onto the mud. The water lapped against the bank, waves of dark oily water seeming to reach for him as he edged forwards, and saw movement ahead.

It was her. The _Gwrach-y-Rhibyn._ The death omen who waited by riversides for unwary travellers who had loved ones that she could steal away. Apparently, Ifor had been right after all.

It was a woman, dressed in ragged clothes of mourning, her head shrouded with a veil of faded black lace. The creature sat hunched at her feet, pressed up against her ankles like a dog, and she was bending over it, her hand cupping its jaw as she examined its wound. As Sean approached, she looked up, slowly turning her head. Her face was waxy-pale, her cheek half-eaten away by rot, but she held herself with pride. Her defensive stance and her forbidding expression both demanded he come no closer. They made Sean feel as if he was the interloper here. 

Without looking away from Sean, she placed herself between him and the creature as though she thought Sean a predator. And watchful and wary, she kept her eyes on him as the creature loped away. She stayed, staring hard at Sean as if she didn’t trust him not to take chase.

When she too vanished, she moved so fast he never saw her go, and he was left with the memory of her face and of the challenge in her eyes, and the itch of danger crawling down his spine. He’d known fear before, but it hadn’t been quite as stark as this in a long while, not even during the confrontation with Clay Cox. It was all the stranger for how gentle she’d seemed with the wretched creature and how she’d set herself between it and Sean, like a sheep guarding her lambs against the advancing wolf.

And there was a strange feeling: Sean had never really thought of himself as a wolf before.

  
  


* * *

  
  


It wasn’t until he climbed back up onto the pier that it fully hit him. Shaky, he leant against a building to give his heart a chance to slow, and wonder if he was going mad. When he’d recovered as much as he thought he was going to, he started to walk, and although he’d meant to head back to the shelter, after a few turning he realised he wasn’t going there at all, but to the Turtle. He stopped, annoyed with himself. He had work to do, books to balance, and it was already well past twilight, but then he remembered Tom’s expression at the talk of the Hag, and how he wouldn’t meet Sean’s eyes, and he started walking again.

When he got to the Turtle, a few faces looked up, some of them guiltily, but the momentary hush soon resumed as he greeted Tom and ordered himself a bottle of porter. Tom welcomed him with his usual hearty cheer, eyeing his bruises – clearly word of the scuffle with the Wet Boot Boys had got around – but didn’t mention them.

Sean drank slowly, pacing himself. He didn’t drink much as a rule, considering it necessary to set a good example, and it was busy tonight. With Tom rushed off his feet, it might take a while before they had the chance to talk. Which was fine by Sean: it gave him the chance to work out what he was going to ask Tom, and, for the matter, whether he really wanted to ask him anything at all.

At one point a hard-faced man he recognised as a member of the Wet Boot Boys started eyeing him, until Tom gave the man a meaningful look which said that while he wasn’t yet in the mood to start boxing ears, he could be if he put his mind to it, and the gang-member quickly thought better of it and kept his head down. How Tom had managed it, Sean didn’t know, but the sanctuary of the Turtle was in its own way as sacrosanct as a cathedral’s.

Mostly Sean thought about Tom Watts.

There seemed to be something false about his usual good-natured cheer tonight, as though he was on edge. A couple of times Sean had glanced his way and found Tom already watching him over the rim of a pint of beer, his jaw tight and his eyes dark. Landlords seemed to have a kind of second-sight, Sean thought, taking another carefully measured sip of his porter. When it came to trouble, anyway.

Everywhere had stories. Everywhere had ghosts. Not like London was ever going to be any different: it was an ancient city, heedless to the gods and monsters it had picked up over the centuries.

He’d taken up his rosary without realising it, giving himself over to the trance-like movement of the beads through his fingers, until he caught the couple on the next table watching him uneasily. Sean let it drop, taking another larger swallow of his porter, thinking he’d need to buy another bottle soon or cut his losses and leave. He hadn’t been drunk since… well, since he was a boy and he’d drunk until he’d spewed his guts up, and not since then. Aside from the all-but-obligatory glasses of brandy punch and whiskey at a wake, he didn’t have much taste for it.

He knew how alcohol could ruin lives, had seen first-hand the desperate need that overtook addicts, swallowing up their lives and eating away at them like rot. He tried not to judge. Mostly he felt pity for them, along with frustration, and sorrow for the ones they left behind. There but for the grace of God, and even now, after a single bottle of porter, he could feel its pull. His nerves had been steadied, the fears that tormented him numbed, if not quite taken away completely.

He lingered as everyone moved on, some more reluctantly than others, until Tom called time with a ringing of the bell, and, "Come on folks, haven’t you all got homes to go to?" And still Sean waited, nursing the dregs of his porter – his second bottle – wondering if he should have ordered a third as the pub entered out around him. He was glad that he hadn’t, and yet sorry for it as well, because he felt more pleasantly relaxed than he had in a while. Tom paused, watching him, passing a dish rag between his hands, Sean waited for Tom to turf him out too, but instead he said nothing, just crossed to the door to shut and lock the pub up for the night. In the universal language of the traditional pub lock-in, the final bolt snapped into place. And when he came back to the table it was with that third bottle of porter, and another bottle of gin, which he set down as he sank into the chair opposite.

"You look like a man who’s seen a ghost," Tom said, "and in my book a man who’s seen a ghost usually needs another drink to steady his nerves."

"And you being a publican wouldn’t have nothing to do with you saying that, sir."

"You look to people’s bodies and souls, Mr Hampton, and I’ll look to their thirsts. This isn’t a dry establishment, by any means, but if I wasn’t here to sell them their gin, they’d find someone else." He seemed unoffended, looking at Sean with good-natured cheer, as if under other circumstances he would have relished the chance to cross swords with Sean in debate over the subject of the demon drink. 

"You're right. I'm sorry."

"You didn’t come here to lecture me about the evils of booze, did you, Mr Hampton?" Tom said.

"No, sir." Sean hesitated. "Do you believe in ghosts, Mr Watts? Or spirits?"

Tom gave him a mock-hard stare, in his eyes the twinkle of humour. "You mean like the ‘Holy Spirit’?" he said, and the forbidding tone of his voice unexpectedly made Sean laugh.

"Not that spirit," he said, reaching for his porter. He tilted it towards Tom. "Although I’d be happy to discuss it with you one day, if you were willing."

"A pub is no place for prayer, Mr Hampton."

"Oh, I don’t know about that, sir. And please, call me Sean."

"All right," Tom said, topping up his gin. "But in that case, you’d better call me Tom and stop calling me ‘sir’. Gives me the willies." He paused, studying Sean over the rim of his glass. "What’d you see?"

"The _Gwrach-y-Rhibyn._ "

Sean waited. Tom had gone still and was studying him, eyes narrowed.

The cavernous room, now it was no longer filled with a crowd in varying degrees of drunkenness, had shrunk to the size of this small table. Everything else, the staircase leading up into shadows draped like velvet, the glimmer of light on the bottles behind the bar, the rain streaking the glass, had taken on the quality of a dream.

Either that, or it was the effect of the porter.

Slowly, Tom drew out a cigarette and offered Sean one, which he refused. "You’ve been listening to too many Welshmen," he finally said. and again Sean felt the certainty that that there was more to the story than simply drunken urban folklore.

"Just the one." He hesitated, staring down at the pitted wood of the table, stained with spilled beer, and continued in a low voice, struggling to shake the impression of others listening in, of a pair of black wings outstretched in the shadows. "I know what I saw, Tom. And I don’t believe she was really the _Gwrach-y-Rhibyn,_ or a _bean sí_ , for that matter. But I’m certain she was real."

"Maybe she was. We see what we want to see. Let me have a stab at what _you_ saw. An old woman, dressed in black? Probably down by the water. Am I right?"

Sean nodded. "You’ve seen her too?"

Tom took a drag of his cigarette, eyes flicking away. "No," he said, and Sean suspected he was lying. "But I grew up round here, and being a landlord you hear all sorts of shit from people who might have otherwise kept schtum. I’ve heard enough stories."

"What sort of stories?"

"Well, round these parts we call it the Sewer Dog," Tom said. "And it’s not some Welsh hag or a banshee or Black Annis or whatever, but _something else._ My grandfather used to tell me stories about her, the old woman who could turn herself into an animal. He heard it from his own father, and his father before him. If there is something haunting these parts, it’s old. People go missing, have done ever since I was a boy, and I don’t just mean that they’re found floating in the river with their throats cut. They vanish into thin air… except, of course, for the times when they don’t, if you catch my drift."

Sean was about to say that, no, he didn’t catch Tom’s drift at all, and then he caught the look on Tom’s face, and he found himself wondering just what it was Tom had seen out there, in the drifting fog and damp London rain.

The shadows deepened all around them. Tom seemed more distant, his eyes and mind elsewhere as he smoked the cigarette with purpose, pinching it between finger and thumb. He let out a long, steady stream of smoke through half-pursed lips, looking suddenly older and painfully tired, the creases around his eyes more deeply scored and the weight of his years weighing on him more heavily. He’d been a sailor once, so Sean had heard. Was he lost in memories of his travels? Or perhaps something closer to home?

Then Tom seemed to shake himself, glancing up as though he’d only just remembered Sean was there. He scratched at his stubbled jaw, and took another long drag on the cigarette before he finally spoke. "You want my advice, Sean?"

"Very much so, sir."

"Stop looking for her and take more care on the streets at night. Whatever she is, she’s dangerous, or if she isn’t, then something out there damned well is."

"I don’t believe in ghosts."

Tom grinned. "Who says," he said, as he stubbed out the cigarette, "that I was talking about ‘ghosts’?"

  
  


* * *

  
  


For all Tom’s warnings, Sean couldn’t stop himself from looking for her, although he wouldn’t have been able to explain to himself why. Perhaps it was the same thing that made him seek out Tom’s company and advice: the instinct that here lay a like-hearted soul. Someone who could, if not exactly lighten his load, then at least make it seem like less of a burden.

Besides, he was curious, and he wasn’t entirely certain that he’d told Tom Watts the truth when he’d claimed not to believe in ghosts. Perhaps he was a Celt at heart after all. So he asked around to see if anyone had any stories, sometimes in the shelter, sometimes in the Turtle, when people’s tongues were loosened. He had a few stories of him own, borrowed mostly, and it wasn’t like he believed them, but they were usually enough to get tongues moving.

Doling out soup to the old ones, the fellows who used to sleep – and still did when they were too drunk to make it to the shelter – down near the banks of the river, he’d ask if any of them had heard about an old woman in black who haunted the river ways.

There were, he slowly began to realise, a lot of stories. Mostly she’d been seen by a friend of a friend, but sometimes the teller of the tale claimed to have seen her themselves. Occasionally, Sean actually believed them.

It felt like he was skirting around the edge of something, something so big he’d barely even glimpsed the edges. It made him think of the ferry from Ireland, the choppy water and the crowded boat, and the sense of the ground dropping away beneath him. There might have been anything beneath those white-capped waves, and he felt the same thing now about London. How deep did those tunnels and sewers plunge beneath the surface world?

Since he was roaming the streets anyway, the miserable, thankless task of searching for lost souls so that they could curse him and God and everything he held dear, it was no hardship to keep an eye out for the Hag too. In fact, looking for her was a welcome distraction. It kept his mind off that bitter and unfailingly unrewarding task.

And, of course, it was also a distraction from Clay, who’d said he’d be back. He was, unfortunately, as good as his word.

Clay never did much. Mostly he’d just loiter outside the shelter, looking for all the world like he was simply waiting for a mate. He’s tip his hat to passers-by who hurried by with their heads down, sensing trouble. When he caught Sean looking, Clay would set a mock-respectful finger to the brim of his hat, flick his cigarette onto the ground and crush it deliberately with the toe of his boot.

When he finally stopped coming, distracted perhaps by a petty gang-war in the ranks of the Wet Boot Boys, Sean felt like he could breathe again for the first time in a while. He wasn’t a fool though. Clay had the tenacity of a terrier, and there was no way he was going to let this go for long.

By then, though, Sean had something else with which to distract himself. Helen McReady, a fellow parishioner at his church, hadn’t attended Mass for a few weeks. He’d been meaning to look in on her, but to his shame it had completely slipped his mind.

When he went to visit, the door was answered by her daughter, Kate, who seemed unexpectedly irritated to see him. "Sean!"

"Afternoon there, Kate, I was just looking in on your mother..."

"She’s fine," she said, a little too sharply. "She’ll be back on her feet soon enough, I’m sure."

From inside, a quavery voice called out, "Who is it, Kate?"

"It’s Sean Hampton, Mam," she called back. "Looking in on you." She shot Sean a look that suggested inviting him in was the last thing she wanted to do, but she relented and ushered him inside.

Helen McReady, for all Kate’s insistence that she was fine, was bedbound, sitting up in bed with a home made blanket spread across her knees. The house was cluttered but spotless, as so many of the poverty-stricken houses in the East End were, with the women who lived there imprisoned by impossibly stringent standards. It was a story told in the two women’s hands, Kate’s red and chapped, and Helen’s gnarled with arthritis. A handful of faded photographs gazed down from the walls, aside from Kate, all that was left of Helen McReady’s family. Kate was her only surviving child.

"Will you have a cup of tea, Mr Hampton?" Helen asked, smiling as if she at least was pleased to see him.

"Ah, no, I don’t want to put you to any trouble," he said, even as Kate was already vanishing to put the kettle on the stove.

Of course there was tea, laid out and brought in by Kate upon a rattling tray, while Sean and Helen prayed together, and then Helen McReady’s eyes were gleaming as she asked after himself. There seemed to be a strange undercurrent between the two women that he couldn’t quite put his finger on, and a feverish light in Helen’s eyes that he didn’t much like.

"I’ll be back soon enough," she said with a conspiratorial air. "Why, didn’t I see the Blessed Virgin herself?"

" _Mam,_ " Kate said sharply, from the doorway.

Sean glanced at her, found her face bleached of colour. Thrown, he looked back at Helen McReady, frowning. "The..."

She rested her crooked fingers on his. "She showed herself to me, Mr Hampton, plain as day, and she promised me I’d never have to worry or fret ever again." She squeezed his hand, but she couldn’t keep the pressure up, her grip quickly weakening. "She promised me a miracle."

Kate bustled in.

"It’s time you got your rest, Mam," she said, and when Sean hesitated she shot him a look so fierce he let her hurry him out of the bedroom. When he glanced back at Helen McReady, she’d lapsed back into prayer. Then Kate closed the bedroom door, cutting her mother off from view.

"She isn’t well," she said firmly.

"What she says she saw..."

"She didn’t see anything." She turned away, and slammed down the teapot so hard it was a wonder it didn’t shatter. "I told you, she isn’t well."

"I don’t think I understand," he said. "Your mother, she’s saying the Virgin Mary visited her? She saw an apparition?"

She swung towards him, throwing a tea towel across the table. "She believes she did, yes."

He was already smiling in astonishment and delighted disbelief. "But if that’s so, then it’s a wonderful thing. It’s a miracle–"

"What miracle? You’ve seen her, Mr Hampton. She’s not cured. She’s getting tireder and sicker."

"You should speak to Father Mullaney. He’s a good man..."

She snorted. "He’s a dirty old lech, is what he is." Silenced, Sean stared at her, trying to find the words – _did he, are you_ – then she gave him a weary look and relented. "Oh, he’s not so bad, I suppose. I’ve known worse priests. But I can’t speak to him about this."

"He’s exactly the person you should be speaking to."

"If I thought it was real, maybe. This isn’t Lourdes, Mr Hampton. There’s no holy spring, no miraculous cure. Just an old woman who’s led a hard life with no help from anyone, least of all God, seeing what she wants to see. If it really was the Virgin, it’s a pity she didn’t come ten years earlier, isn’t it?"

"You have to have faith, Kate."

"Who says I do, Mr Hampton? Father Mullaney? _You_? Just one more person telling me what I ought to do, well, I’m bloody done with it."

"Kate–"

She shook her head, refusing to hear it, wiping her reddened hands on her apron. "It’s time you went. You’re a good man and you mean well, but right now you’re not helping. What Mam needs is rest and a doctor, not delusions."

"What if it’s real?"

Something flickered over her face, an expression he can’t read. Her skin was even paler than the last time he’d seen her and her eyes sunken. She hid it well – she was a survivor, like him – but he’d had too much practice not to recognise fear when he saw it.

"It’s not," she said, and shut the front door. She didn’t quite close it in his face, but she might as well have done.

  
  


* * *

  
  


Out on the street, he tugged his collar up. For once, it was almost a clear night. The pallid face of the moon was half-hidden behind a chimney pot, but the moonlight reminded him of Helen McReady’s eyes shining with their fervent feverish light as she spoke in his mind of miracles. A good Catholic woman, her faith strong and true despite the hand of strife and suffering that life had dealt her – he’d known too many like her. It was a pity that her daughter wasn’t as strong in faith as her mother, but there was a feeling gnawing at him that it was somehow Kate who was seeing things more clearly. She was afraid of something, that much was clear. Not that that was all that unusual on the docks.

The lampposts in these streets were sparsely interspersed, and deep shadows pooled in between those weak circles of light.

 _Something’s coming,_ he thought with a growing sense of dread. He held his breath, fighting the urge to reach up beneath his coat and grasp his rosary. The next lamppost seemed suddenly very far off, and what little light it cast waging a losing battle against the gathering darkness.

Around him a whispering rose up, distant and extremely close all at once. His skin prickled. With his gaze fixed on that far-off island of light, he picked up his pace. His footsteps seemed to have developed an echo, which rang out a half-beat after his. Sped up when he sped up. Slowed when he slowed.

He stopped. The echo stopped too. His skin tightened with sharp, prickling fear. His heartbeat pulsed in the hollow of his throat.

He was being watched.

Clay Cox, he thought. It had to be. They had unfinished business, the two of them, and Sean curled his hands into fists. He’d defend himself if he had to, if he was forced to – ‘Turn the other cheek’ only went so far – but he wouldn’t have a prayer against Clay, who would have come armed–

And then the moon emerged from behind the clouds, and he saw a figure ahead, limned in moonlight. It had a face as pale and as perfect as a marble statue, and it stood at the edge of the circle of light cast by a distant lamppost. It was lit, not by the yellowish electric glow or the silvery flood of moonlight, but by a luminous light that seemed to make it shine from within.

Then it was gone, so quickly he wasn’t sure he’d seen anything at all. In the midst of his bewilderment he missed the sound of footsteps behind him. Only when he caught the smell of the river, thick in the air, did he realise he wasn’t alone.

The old woman from the river bank, the shadows gathered about her as tightly as the shawl draped over her head. Close up, it was impossible to tell how old she was; the sense of age he’d felt at the river was suggested by her old-fashioned clothes and the ancient weight of her eyes, but there was a strange smoothness to her pallid skin and some vestiges of beauty still remained. Her expression was cautious, but unafraid, and when she spoke, her voice was deceptively soft. "I understand you’re looking for me," she said. "Perhaps, you might see fit to tell me why."

"I mean you no harm, madam, I swear it."

"No? I can think of no other reason why you might be looking. You’re not the first of your kind to attempt to hunt me down."

"My kind?" He got no answer to this, only an absolute silence, and he tried again. "My name is Sean Hampton. I run a night asylum for the homeless, and I try, in my own small way, to help those who are suffering and in need."

"A good Samaritan, then?"

"I try to be."

Another breath stirred the air, as though the city itself were exhaling while she considered this. When she spoke again, her voice was more gentle. "I have come," she said, "to request, politely, that you stop looking for me. You have no business with us, Mr Hampton, and I do not think you realise how dangerous it is to draw such attention your way. I am not the only creature that hunts on the streets of London."

"I only want to help," he said, bursting out with frustration. She stared at him, a strange look on her ravaged face, as if she saw him anew.

"I could almost believe you," she said, seeming bemused.

"Because it’s the truth. God help me if I’d ever lie about such a thing. I swore to help all God’s creatures..."

"And you think _me_ one of God’s creatures?" she said, with rich amusement.

"What else would you be?"

The corner of her mouth quirked. "You’re a strange man, Mr Hampton, and a brave one. It’s to your credit, but it changes nothing. You risk much by searching for me, and I’m afraid I must insist that you stop. We have been well-hidden for a very long time, and I will allow nothing to endanger our sanctuary, not even a man who means well. This is the first and the only time I will ask this of you. Do you understand?"

"I do, but–"

"Will you stop looking?"

Reluctantly, Sean nodded. She held his gaze with her eerie piercing eyes, then inclined her head, and began to turn away.

"Wait," Sean called out before she disappeared again. She stopped and turned her head, but didn’t quite look at him, Waiting for his question. "Can I at least know your name?"

She did look at him then, fixing him with her eyes as if she meant to root out all his secrets. "The ones in my care call me Old Bridget," she said.

Sean, struck by the odd feeling that he’d been bestowed with a gift, opened his mouth to thank her. He was too late: she’d already gone.

  
  


* * *

  
  


And then, like a bad penny, Clay came back.

It was one of his flock who brought him the news, Esme who by the looks of her belly had got herself into trouble. She was only just starting to show, and Sean might not have noticed if it hadn’t been for the way she was holding herself to hide her stomach and the frightened looks she’d started sending his way, as though she was bracing herself for his anger and judgement.

He’d have to talk to her, and soon, but her condition had turned his thoughts towards his own mother, the woman who to his knowledge he had never met and never would meet. Sometimes he thought she’d been part of the reason why he left Ireland: although he had a list as long as his arm. In Dublin, he’d never been able to look into the eyes of a woman of a certain age without wondering, _Is it you?_

"Esme..." he began, and then he saw her expression and started to his feet. "What is it?"

"It’s Clay Cox," she said, and Sean leaned forward heavily on his desk, his brief hope extinguished. "He’s back, Mr Hampton. He’s–"

She broke off, stumbling away from the door-frame as he marched past her, a storm of anger and guilt raging in his chest.

The moment he saw Clay outside, lips wrinkling back from his teeth in an expression that was more snarl than smile and his drowned-rat face pinched with cold, something inside Sean broke. His anger – righteous, but then again anger always seemed that way – carried him out through the doors and into the rain. Clay pushed himself away from the wall, readying himself to meet Sean dead on.

And then, through the buzzing in his ears and the sound of the rain, someone called Sean's name. A young boy hurtled into the yard and came skidding to a halt on the wet stone, intent on Sean.

"You need to come, Mr Hampton," he said, swiping water out of his eyes, breathless with excitement at the honour of being the one to deliver the message. "There’s an old woman fallen down near the docks. She’s hurt."

Sean’s first thought was of the hag, but that made no sense. He couldn’t imagine that cool-eyed, steady woman calling for him should she be hurt. He couldn’t imagine her hurt at all. "What’s her name?"

The boy shrugged impatiently. "She says she knows you. Will you come?"

"Of course I’ll come. Let me fetch a blanket."

He glanced up, but Clay Cox had vanished. Sean closed his eyes, and offered up a prayer that seemed suddenly very small and quiet, a tiny shining voice in the midst of the pouring rain.

It wasn’t Bridget at all, of course, but Helen McReady, crumpled upon the street. People clustered about her. Someone was holding a broken umbrella above her head, its twisted spokes reaching like a broken wing of a crow. The fabric was ragged and well-holed, and was probably letting through more rain than it stopped, but Helen seemed not to care. She was whispering under her breath, her face turned upwards towards the sky and her eyes glazed and unseeing. Someone had left a cup of tea beside her, but it had long since gone cold, full to overflowing with mingled tea and rain water.

Everyone but her turned towards him as he approached. "She won’t move," a woman told him helplessly. "We tried to move her, Mr Hampton, but she started to scream."

"Never heard anything like it," the man kneeling beside Helen said. He straightened up with indecent haste now, edging back behind Sean with a palpable air of relief. And he glanced up too, a quick darting glance that he didn’t seem to want anyone else to see, scanning the nearby rooftops as if he thought there might be something there watching. "It was like we was hurting her."

"She might have hit her head," the woman said. "We didn’t know what else to do."

"You did the right thing," Sean reassured them. He knelt beside Helen, eyeing the way her knuckles flexed and twisted in her lap. Her hair was plastered to her scalp and she was shivering, but otherwise there was no sign that she felt the cold on her shining ecstatic face. There was blood on her throat. It had been diluted to a weak pink across her crepey chest, but beneath the line of her jaw it was much darker.

He murmured her name. The rhythm of her whispering was almost familiar; it had the cadence of prayer, but it wasn’t any prayer that Sean had ever heard. Gently, he laid his hand on her cheek and said her name again.

The whispering slowed gradually, like a child’s spinning top. "Sean?" she murmured.

"Yes, Helen. I’m here. Come on now, you’re frozen, sitting out in the rain like this. I’ll get you home."

Her bony fingers closed weakly around his wrist. "Did you see her?" she whispered, her burning eyes holding his. "She called to me, Sean. She asked about you. Asked me who you were, what sort of man you are."

Unease crept down his spine.

"We can talk about it later, Helen," he said as he shrugged off his coat and pulled it around her shoulders. "Once you’re home, safe and sound. I’m going to lift you now, is that all right?"

The others were edging away now, eager to leave him to it. In normal circumstances, people like this would be stumbling over each other to help an elderly woman when she fell, fussing around her with blankets and brandy and endless supplies of hot, steaming tea. Now they were afraid, and their fear was both contagious and baffling.

Helen was so light she seemed weightless when he slung her arm over his shoulder and straightened up. She slumped against him, a frozen little bundle of sticks beneath her sodden clothes. He could smell the metallic reek of blood on her every breath. She clung to him as they made their way through the streets, and all the way she whispered to him of miracles, of how _she_ had been watching him, of what a good man he was, almost a saint.

"I’m no saint," he said, and knew it for truth. A saint wouldn’t be fighting the urge to shove her away and flee to save his own neck, to escape the feeling that dogged their steps.

He could hear footsteps underneath the sound of the rain. So faint he could have fooled himself there was nothing there at all, despite the shadow that from time to time was cast across the ground before them, as if it were chasing on ahead. Despite the presence that Sean occasionally sensed so close behind him he could feel its cold breath on the nape of his neck.

The rain plastered his hair against his forehead and ran down into his eyes, half-blinding him. At a street-corner he had to stop and take his bearings, and as he wiped the water from his eyes, his gaze momentarily caught on a figure standing motionless in the mouth of an alley. When he looked back, helpless to stop himself, there was nothing there, but at the edge of his vision, a jewel-coloured light glimmered against the bruise-black sky, as though a sun were rising, a sun the colour of sapphire and lapis lazuli.

They were almost back to Helen’s house when he stopped. It was above him, somewhere to the right. He could see it, splintered slivers of glistening light, reflecting the rain and bleeding around the edges. Sean’s breath was shallow, the muscles of his neck locked, because he was desperate to look around, he needed to look around, oh God he had to see, he had to know, and Helen was twisting in his arms and crying out in joy. Small and fragile, she might be, but in her mania she was frighteningly strong. A noise emerged from her bony throat, a high-pitched bird-like cry, that was part joy and part terror.

"She’s here," she cried. "Oh Sean, she’s here," and he was shaking, because he knew that if he looked, he would be lost. He remembered Bridget with her sad eyes telling him she wasn’t the only creature to hunt on the streets of London.

He tightened his grip around Helen, thinking of Lot’s wife, and he kept putting one foot in front of the other, focusing on the doorway to Helen’s house, the light from the windows, and the movement within, and he was shouting, raising his voice to be heard above the rain.

He faltered only when the voice came singing in his head, a woman’s voice, so sweet and musical it made both his heart ache and his skin crawl because it was a stolen memory plucked from his mind.

Something was gathering above him, coiling up like a serpent, ready to strike, but ahead the door had opened. Helen was weeping and struggling in his arms, scratching at him, and then they were through the door and he was shoving her into her wide-eyed daughter’s arms.

Once the door was closed behind him, his sense began to return. Dripping all over their spotless hallway, he stared at the crucifix and icons displayed on the wall, while Kate took her mother into her room. He swept a hand through his sodden hair, foolishness and embarrassment sweeping in on him in a rush.

Here, in this room that smelled sharply of lemon and tea, of cooking smells that had sunk into the walls no matter how hard they scrubbed to keep it spotless, everything was faded with neglect and age. Everything shabby, except for an icon that hung upon the wall, an image of the Virgin, gleaming gold and sapphire blue. It seemed to shine, even in the darkness.

Sean wasn’t entirely certain he hadn’t lost his mind.

Kate emerged from the bedroom, his coat draped over one arm and a towel in another.

Sean took the coat but shook his head at the offer of the towel. "I’ll only have to go out there again," he heard himself say. He didn’t sound like himself at all.

"Perhaps..." Kate hesitated, and when he looked at her, she didn’t want to meet his eyes. "Perhaps you shouldn’t go back out there. Not in this filthy weather anyway. Not without a cup of tea, at least."

He opened his mouth to say yes, absolutely, despite his embarrassment at the surge of relief he felt at the offer. The urge to accept was so overwhelming he might actually have stumbled over the words in his rush to get them out, but then he remembered Clay and Billy and the shelter. Esme’s frightened face.

By now, Billy would have heard that Clay was back, and he’d be terrified. They all would be. One cup of tea here might not do any harm, maybe; he could sit by the fire in the warm, let his wet clothes dry off a bit, but he knew it wouldn’t just be one cup. If he let himself stop, even for a moment, sitting by the fire with the faces of Helen’s dead children staring down at him from the mantelpiece, he’d get to thinking, and then he’d get to remembering, and then he had a feeling he wouldn’t be able to go outside at all.

So he shook his head and reached with aching fingers for his coat. Kate looked like she didn’t want to hand it over, but she did, and stood back as he shrugged it on. The lining was cold and wet, clinging to him like a clammy second skin and making him feel even colder.

What he needed, he thought, was a talk with Tom Watts. Some steady, common sense to help him put his mind at rest. Stories were one thing, but there was no point in flinching at shadows.

At first when he stepped back out into the rain and the darkness, all seemed well. The streets were no longer a confusing labyrinth of shifting shadow, and there was no gleaming sapphire light, and no sweetly singing voice inside his head. Just the rain and the houses, shut up tight against the weather and the night.

He’d return in the morning to check on her. So he told himself as he made for home, unwilling to admit to himself how he kept close to the pools of light from the streetlamps, how his steps involuntarily picked up speed when he was forced to pass through a patch of darkness, how he kept his head down, wary of glancing up towards the rooftops, as though he might see something there following him.

Not that it made any difference. Because when he reached the end of the street, and turned to take a right, she was there. Waiting for him.

If he hadn’t been so stunned, he would have dropped to his knees. This was his miracle, the sign he’d been waiting for not just in London but throughout a life spent clinging to his faith like a man clinging to the last pieces of wreckage from a ship.

She was beautiful. Her pale hair was gilded with the lapis light that rippled in a halo about her head. The light spilled over her shoulders and down her back like a cloak of shimmering silk, shot through with wisps of gold and scarlet.

His fear had been swept away by his awe and wonder, but in its wake, the realisation that something was wrong came creeping in. Her expression was not one of quiet serenity, nor of adoration, nor even of the grief of a mother cradling the corpse of her child. Her crimson eyes burned with hunger, and there was an avid eagerness to her face, a face that seemed for an instant not beautiful, but bitter and rat-like, with pinched features and a thin-lipped mouth. Nor did the play of light and colour quite disguise the unhealthy pallor of her grey-tinged skin.

He saw this only for an instant, and then she was perfect again, and surely that glimpse of imperfection had merely been a trick of the light, a failure of Sean’s unworthy mind. Her expression was the one he would have expected to see: sorrowful, composed, forgiving. _Disappointed_.

"I’m sorry," he croaked as he sensed her pulling away from him, a deep well of sorrow in her eyes. How he had disappointed her, that perfect blessed mother, and the ethereal light dimmed as she withdrew.

He took a step towards her and then another, reaching out an imploring hand towards her. She paused, turning her attention back to him. Dizzied by the weight of her regard, he shook, and the world faded, slipping back into shadows, unable to compete with the glory of her holy light. The rain reached with fingers of ice down under the collar of his shirt and coat. He was soaked to the skin yet she – more proof of the miracle as if he’d ever needed any – was bone dry.

She didn’t speak, but the music came again, deep in his skull, a woman’s voice raised in song, and he knew, because she was telling him with her sweet sad eyes, that this was his mother’s voice, his mother’s song, the last and only gift she was ever able to give to him before she gave him over to the tender care of the orphanage. 

He wept at the beauty of it, at the hope and sorrow in his mother’s voice, woven through with the prayers she made in the hopes he’d find a better life there than she ever could have given him. He hoped to God she’d never found out the truth.

It was a miracle. A true miracle, and still some part of him squirmed with inexplicable revulsion and fear.

"Who was she?" he asked.

Her smile widened. The glint of white shining teeth. She didn’t speak but Sean felt a sensation in his head like a nail scratching at the inside of his skull. She held her arms open, her palms out.

_I will show you._

A promise. An offering. An invitation.

Which one it was Sean could not tell, but he was nodding anyway, acquiescing to whatever she wanted, distantly aware that he was crying and didn’t know why.

She came towards him, the glorious, burning light of her presence enveloping him, the Mother of God, the Queen of Heaven, while a tiny voice railed in fury inside him, howling that she was neither of those things, but _something else_. It would have gone unheeded, but for a rising memory of Helen McReady, broken and bloody and raving, and the fear in her daughter’s eyes. With the memory, a shadow seemed to pass over the Virgin’s face, and the dimming of the coalescing light lent her face a very different cast: hollow cheeks and sunken eyes, thin lips wrinkling back to reveal teeth that were too white, too sharp, and a look of gleeful hunger in her savage red eyes.

Sean flinched as she cupped his cheeks, so close he could feel her wet dress against him, her damp, cold breath against his face, her long nails scratching at his skin through his beard at his jawline, working their way deeper.

She smelled dark and coppery, of smoke and rot and blood, and he shuddered as inside his mind a mother that never was but might have been stroked his hair and hushed him and kissed his tears away and told him that he was finally safe.

He could smell blood on her breath, some deep reek of rot rising from deep inside her, and with it came a snarl, her fingers no longer scratching playfully, at his skin, but twisting his head to the side as she leaned in closer still, her breath on his exposed throat. He heard the saliva-slick pop of her smacking her lips, a hiss of delight, felt the brush of her mouth against his neck as her fingers bit deep into his scalp.

Something tore her away. 

His scalp burned as a handful of his hair was yanked free, bringing fresh hot tears to his eyes. Sean crumpled, gasping and shaking, wiped the mingled rain and tears from his eyes, blinking to clear his vision. He heard a sound, a terrible screeching, filled with mindless black rage and hatred.

He saw her at once. He couldn’t help but see.

Gone was the vision of perfect womanhood, the lustrous beauty, the luminous sapphire light, and the jewel-bright presence. Somehow poised on the sloping overhang of a roof above, she was thin and pallid, sharp-featured with sunken cheeks and thin hair plastered against her skull. Glittering eyes glared with maddened fury at his rescuer.

It was Old Bridget, standing on the street, her posture defensive, and as Sean scrambled to his feet her head twitched his way. Above the woman drew back, coiling her body into position ready to spring. Sean yelled a warning, but his voice died on the air as the woman dissolved into smoke.

She reappeared almost at once, blinking back into existence behind Bridget, who was already moving, as if she had seen the trick coming. She span away, mouth open, teeth shining white and wet.

She was fast. They both were, moving so quickly all he could see were snatched glimpses of the two of them ripping at each other like half-mad dogs. The woman caught her arms around Bridget from behind, ripping at her dress with her teeth, while Bridget twisted in her arms like an eel. Growling, Bridget reached up, gripped the other woman’s hair and dropped forward, bringing her up and over and slamming her down on the ground.

As Sean searched for a weapon, found and dug out a splintered chair leg from a pile of rubbish, he heard a sound like tearing cloth behind him. 

Bridget had wrenched away, her dress and the flesh of her shoulder hanging in tattered rags, but the woman was still clutching a fistful of her bodice and yanked her down. Bridget landed almost cat-like, snarling. In the struggle her shawl had been lost, revealing the patchy close-cropped white of her hair.

The woman spun, moving with unnatural speed and agility, twisting out from underneath Bridget with a slash of her free hand. It seemed not to touch Bridget at all, but still sent her spinning over onto her back with a spray of blood. And then the woman was atop her, straddling her, and there was nothing human about the woman now, no pretence, no glamour, as she gripped Bridget’s head, her blackened thumb-nails scrabbling along Bridget’s cheekbones for her eyes.

"No!" He yelled it without thinking, wielding the chair-leg. _Not a man of violence,_ he thought and wanted to laugh wildly, and then to weep. The woman’s gaze snapped up at his cry and when it struck him if felt like she’d nailed him to the spot, as though nails had been driven through his feet, pinning him to the stone.

 _Oh God,_ he thought. _Oh God, help me._ This, he imagined, was how the mouse must feel when it had caught the attention of the cat.

He felt, inexplicably, the urge to apologise. To fall on his knees and beg forgiveness. To _pray_.

He’d seen madness before, the kind of sickness that got inside a man’s mind and turned him against himself, but the look in her eyes was madness as he’d never seen before, the need to destroy, to rip and claw and gorge until there was nothing left. He was helpless in the face of it, just a man with nothing to defend himself except for the flimsy protection of prayer and a chair leg he was about to drop.

He tried to tighten his grip. Failed. This, he knew, was a fight he could not win.

"Let her go," he said.

Mad eyes took the measure of him, found him wanting. She threw Bridget down, and then she was coming at him so fast all his reason was washed away on a flood of bright white terror. She slammed into him like a train and kept on, snatching his feet from the ground. His back struck a lamppost, his head slamming back against the metal. Hate and rage seethed off her, yet she moved in absolute silence. Her fist closed around his throat, plucking him off the ground.

The chair leg clattered from his grip, forgotten. Her fist tightened.

Strangely, incongruously, Sean found himself thinking of Tom Watts. Tom with his dark assessing eyes and way of thinking before he speaks. _We see what we want to see_ , he was saying in Sean’s mind, and Sean, dizzy and faint and on the verge of unconsciousness, wondered just what it was that Tom might have wanted to see, and swore to himself, in the moments before he was about to black out, that he’d make certain to ask the next time there was a quiet moment in the Turtle, the two of them enshrined at the centre of an island surrounded by darkness. Except he probably wasn’t ever going to see Tom again. Or anyone else, for that matter.

She was angry with him. Beyond rational thought, like a tantrumming child. He could see it the way her features twisted, as she willed him to see her as she wanted him to, to recognise whatever glamour she’d cast over herself, but it was gone, the spell broken. There was nothing sacred about her or her little trick, but there was something else, something about her face. He’d seen it before somewhere, he was certain.

And them, distant, so faint he barely registered, he heard a woman’s voice.

"You’re in my world now, Ekon."

The words made little sense, yet the grip around his throat eased, enough that he was able to gasp and draw a little air into his burning lungs.

Bridget was rising unsteadily to her feet, a dark blur. The woman seemed at first uncertain, then she yanked Sean away from the lamppost and spun around, holding him like a shield, her claws poised at his throat. Bridget’s cold gaze lingered on his face.

"What do I care for the life of a mortal?" she said. "He’s as much my enemy as you are."

It came to him then. The memory of where he’d see the woman’s face before. Not in person, but in a photograph. Gazing down from the mantelpiece in Helen McReady’s house. Her daughter. Her youngest. Who’d died.

"Hannah." His voice was scratchy and hoarse, but from the way she tensed at his back he knew she’d heard him. The name meant something to her still. Bridget was watching him, her expression impenetrable.

"Your mother..." he started, and it was as if the ground had opened up before him. He knew he was about to say the wrong thing; he’d made a misstep and he’d die for it, and still he couldn’t stop himself. "Your mother still prays for you."

She made a sound. A keening, rich with fury and pain, and threw him aside like a rag doll. He hit a wall, and crumpled, dazed, felt the beads of the rosary around his neck. The cross had slipped out from beneath his coat and dangled against his chin, but he barely time to recover before he saw her coming at him. His ribs blazed in agony as he tried to roll away,

She faltered.

Her eyes widened at the sight of the rosary, and some instinct of survival gripped him as he took the cross and thrust it forwards as far as he could. She flinched, shielding her eyes as though the mere sight of the crucifix burned her. Her fear was so intense he wanted to weep, but instead he pulled it over his head and used the wall to push himself upwards. His ribs spasmed, agonising enough to make him cry out and then she was coming at him, spitting and snarling, and he knew he was a dead man.

She jolted. Stopped. Looked down in shock and confusion at the splintered end of the chair leg jutting from her chest.

Bridget let go, stepping away.

The woman who was once a girl called Hannah looked up at him, her eyes wide and frightened, a bubble of blood popping on her lips as she opened her mouth as if to ask Sean a question. Then she collapsed to her knees, her hands grasping weakly at the length of wood, trying to pull it free. The light died in her eyes and she fell forward, and lay still.

Bridget crouched by the body and touched the woman’s cheek, then gently closed her eyes.

Sean limped to where Bridget’s shawl had fallen across the ground like a smear of blood. Looking back at her, he saw what little hair she had left, cropped close to a scalp scarred and pitted with scabs. Some were flaking away, and beneath he could see the wet white gleam of bone.

She lifted her gaze to his. Wordlessly, Sean held out the shawl, and she stared at him for a moment, before taking it with a soft word of thanks. She draped it back over her head, seeming suddenly exhausted, but still the look she turned on him was one of sympathy.

"Did you know her?"

"No..." He shook his head, felt all at once the pressing urge to be sick and swallowed hard until the impulse had passed. "I’ve never met her before. I thought… I thought she was..."

And then it flooded in on him, the desperate hope he’d felt when he’d thought her the harbinger of a miracle, the Blessed Virgin herself, and all the time it had been nothing but a cruel little trick, banal and sacrilegious and profane. He shuddered, torn between shaky laughter and tears, and what came out of him, wrenching his battered frame, was both and neither and something in between. He felt something against his back, Bridget’s hand resting upon his shoulders, a steady consoling weight.

  
  


* * *

  
  


"Does it ever get any easier?" Sean asked her later, when enough time had passed that it felt like he’d had a chance to get his breath back. They were sheltering from the rain beneath the overhang of a pier. Close to Bridget’s domain; he recognised the scent on the air.

He’d watched her as she removed her shawl to wring the rainwater from it. He’d had the feeling that it was a test of some kind, so he didn’t react to the ruin of her shorn skull, the blackened flesh and the white gleam of bone. It had felt strangely intimate, like watching a lover dress themselves after a stolen couple of hours of guilty pleasure, and Sean looked away, found himself thinking of Tom. When she replaced the shawl on her head, she seemed more at ease in his company, and if she had been testing him Sean thought he might have passed.

He was glad of it. Bridget was a long way from the perfect ideal of womanhood, but Sean found he liked her very much.

"Not in my experience," she said, "and I have been doing this for a very long time."

He’d been more right than he realised, that first time he’d seen her. The two of them shared a common aim: to protect. She was the guardian of a sanctuary for her kind, hidden deep in the sewers of the city. A secret place for the ones like her and less than her, forgotten children, broken and ruined.

"Like the poor wretch I saw by the docks," he said, and she inclined her head. "How is he, by the way? I know he was wounded."

"He’s well now. The wound will never quite heal completely..." She tilted her head and gestured towards the bitemarks on her shoulder. They gaped open, bloodless wounds. "...But it has ceased to bother him."

"If there’s anything I can do..."

She shook her head. "There’s nothing, Mr Hampton. But thank you."

"Sean," he said, and she regarded him with a sad sweet smile. He found himself staring at her in fascination, at her colourless eyes and greying pallor. She looked like Hannah in some ways, but Hannah’s skin had been unbroken, and his rosary, lying in full view against his chest seemed not to concern Bridget at all.

"You’re not like them," he said. "Not like the… man I saw on the docks, but you’re nothing like that woman either. You’re almost..." _Almost human_ , he’d been about to say before he caught himself and he winced at his rudeness. Bridget watched him with a half-hidden hint of amusement.

"The woman who attacked you was an Ekon, driven mad by the process of being turned. You mortals would know her as a vampire."

Sean closed his eyes and dropped his head back, not knowing whether to laugh. He might have done if it wouldn’t have hurt so much. He was fairly sure he’d cracked a rib or two, and by God he’d have some bruises tomorrow. But he was alive, so there was that, at least. One thing to be grateful for, even if everything he’d always known and believed had just been tipped upside down and wrenched inside out.

"Sean?"

"I’m all right," he said, not opening his eyes. "Go on, Bridget."

"The man you met by the river was a Skal. Some call them the bastard off-shoots of vampires, monstrosities to be pitied and loathed." Something about the way her voice twisted at this drew his attention and he looked at her. She was still smiling, _just_ , but her eyes had hardened.

"But you’re not like him either."

"No. And yes. I’m not like most Skals, but I _am_ a Skal, and there have been others like me, who retain more of their previous lives. Who remain able to think and reason. Not many, but some."

"You feel responsible for them."

"Wouldn’t you?"

He held her gaze for a moment, thinking. "I’m sorry, Bridget," he said, "I know I’m asking too many questions, but..."

That look again. That smile. As if she knew exactly what he wanted to ask. "Ask it, Sean."

"Is there a reason why you’re like this? Why you’re different to the others."

She was silent for a long moment, fingering the ragged lace edge of her shawl. It slipped back, showing a narrow band of scalp, the red gleam of raw flesh beneath the peeling edge of a blackened scab. It felt deliberate somehow, a challenge, but Sean had once peeled rotted leather away from the necrotic foot of a dying alcoholic; it was fair to say he’d seen worse. Nor was he afraid of the dead.

"I was a broken wretched thing once," she said. "Deserted by the faithless man I loved and who, I am quite certain loved me back. Yet that was not enough." She tugged the shawl back into place. "Another man, another Ekon, took pity on me, and that is all I have to say on the matter. The rest is private."

Sean nodded slowly, swallowing down his frustration and curiosity. God knew, he understood the need for privacy, especially in those who had little else. "Will I see you again?"

"That may not be wise," she told him gently, but he caught the brief moment of hesitation before she spoke, the flash of longing in her eyes. If the others of her kind were all like that wretch he’d seen by the river, how alone must she feel, as desperate for companionship as Sean was himself. How long had it been since she’d had a conversation with a living – or even not-so-living – soul? Another answer that lay in her eyes. Why else would she have protected him? Why else would she have approached him, when he might otherwise never have heard anything of her kind other than rumours?

"We share a common goal, Bridget," he said, a little of the old fervour entering his voice. She cast him an amused look, seeming almost as taken aback by him as he was with her. He at least had the excuse of being in shock. "We can help each other."

"I’m not so sure about that," she said, still smiling.

"I am, though," he said, and laughed, a sure sign the shock hadn’t quite passed completely. "We were meant to find each other, Bridget. I’m certain of it. I’ve never been so certain of anything in my life."

  
  


* * *

  
  


On their way back through the streets, she left him before they reached the shelter, peeling away, he presumed, to join the others of her kind who had been keeping pace, loping alongside like a pack of wolves. Some stared at him in stark suspicion, but most gazed at Bridget with adoration. Whoever she was, whatever she was, they loved her, these wretched children. And then she was gone, before he could say anything more to her, so suddenly and silently, he didn’t notice the moment she left his side. He simply opened his mouth to say something and found her gone and the other Skald vanished, the street empty except for Sean.

No, he realised, as a shape stepped forward out of the shadows by the locked-up gate to the night asylum. Not quite empty.

A fist of dread tightened around his heart at the sight of the diminutive figure, the flare of cigarette embers illuminating the face in shadow beneath the brim of the hat.

Clay Cox.

 _Not now_ , he thought, dread and resentment gnawing at him at the thought of having this to deal with now, when he was tired and in pain. He saw Clay’s spiteful grin and hard glittering eyes, and then something happened: Sean’s mind cleared, like a ray of sunlight piercing the clouds on an overcast day, and his fear and exhaustion melted away in a moment of perfect clarity.

Sean began to walk, not fast, but at a steady unhurried pace, his hands loose at his sides. He knew only one thing: that he was not dealing with this tonight. He approached Clay with neither fear nor anger, his mind clearer than it had been in a long time. Sean neither slowed nor flinched, until he was less than a couple of feet away from Clay and staring him down. An expression of uncertainty flickered across Clay’s face. 

Sean saw then all the things he’d never noticed before: how young Clay was, just a boy, really, out of his depth and drowning. Sean had known plenty like him, although not many quite so vicious, but what choice would anyone have but to be vicious with no family to turn to other than the gangs? And there but for the grace of God…

Shadows moved at the edge of his vision, and Clay’s eyes flicked away, but Sean held Clay’s gaze. He didn’t look away. He couldn’t. If he did, the spell would be broken.

It was Clay who moved first. Hiding his disquiet behind a clenched jaw, he brought his cigarette to his lips and took a last drag, his gaze flicking upwards to a spot somewhere above Sean’s head. Then he nodded to Sean, flicked the cigarette away onto the wet street, turned his back and sloped away.

Sean didn’t move until Clay had vanished around the corner, then it was as though he’d just taken a boot to the gut, the air leaving him in a rush.

He saw Bridget once more that night. After unlocking the gate to let himself in, and locking it again afterwards, he saw her, silhouetted against the light of a streetlamp. He lifted his hand in greeting and she returned the gesture. Not much, in the grand scheme of things, but he was certain now that he’d be seeing her again.

After all, it was true what he’d told her: they did share a common goal, a common burden in the protection of the docks, and a common need for companionship. A strange sort of companionship, to be sure, but a welcome one, and when he’d finally completed his rounds of the asylum and dragged his bruised and battered body into his narrow rickety bed, he plunged almost immediately into the welcoming embrace of sleep and slept better than he had in a long time, cushioned by hope and the certain knowledge that he was finally not alone.


End file.
